Ultimately they paid about $2 million into an account overseas, though it’s unclear if his family ever received a penny.Ĭompulsive and impatient, Tolkachev hid documents in his coat day after day to slip them past checkpoints at his office or photographed them in the dim light of a toilet stall, rushing them back to the files each night.
After offering to pay $300,000, the CIA gave him 300,000 Russian rubles, worth a fraction as much. The CIA called it an L-pill the L stood for “lethal.” But Tolkachev kept pleading, and the agency ultimately agreed to furnish him with a deadly cyanide pill, hidden inside a pen so he could quickly commit suicide if the KGB came to arrest him. Jumping out of cars in dark corners, donning elaborate disguises and using pop-up “jack-in-the-box” dummies to evade the near-constant KGB surveillance, CIA officers soon began meeting him regularly to hand over tiny cameras, special film, false documents and, at his request, Alice Cooper and Led Zeppelin tapes for his teenage son.ĬIA supervisors in Washington repeatedly refused one request from CKSPHERE, as they called their new agent. But he wanted face-to-face meetings, if only to convince himself that Americans cared. He was a “dissident at heart,” he explained, and he wanted to inflict “maximum damage in shortest time” against the Soviet government.Īt first the CIA tried to communicate with him by stashing special writing pads in a dirty mitten at a “dead drop” near Tolkachev’s apartment. As the CIA’s first real agent in Moscow, Tolkachev helped the clandestine service regain its footing and justify its growing budget. But he arguably saved the CIA as well.īungled spy cases, internal dysfunction and congressional investigations had paralyzed the CIA in the early 1970s. The book’s title comes from a simple question: What’s a spy really worth? In 1979, a year after Tolkachev had begun looting Soviet military vaults, the Air Force estimated he already had saved the Pentagon about $2 billion in research and development costs. Hoffman interviewed key players and gained access to more than 900 pages of long-secret CIA files and operational cables to fill in a crucial gap in the Cold War espionage canon.
Hoffman’s scrupulously reported “The Billion Dollar Spy,” a true-life tale so gripping at times it reads like spy fiction. spy story, complete with a trove of trade-craft tricks, is the grist for Pulitzer Prize-winning author David E.
Howard slipped past the FBI and became the first CIA officer to defect to Moscow. The KGB arrested Tolkachev in 1985 and executed him. Howard, sought revenge by selling agency secrets.
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